The Tempest is a play written by William Shakespeare that displays many unique qualities of characters, a variety of symbols, and important themes. William Shakespeare was born on April 23rd, 1564 in Stratford-upon-Avon in England. Shakespeare is regarded by many to be the best writer in the English language. Marrying Anne Hathaway, Shakespeare had a son and two daughters. Shakespeare died on his birthday in 1616. The Tempest was one of Shakespeare’s later plays. The Tempest, considered to be a comedy, has several plots. Many themes and symbols can be spotted in The Tempest, along with many interesting character qualities.

Critics discussed three important themes in The Tempest, including alienation. Being an outsider himself, Prospero comes to the island and enslaves spirits that are already on the island. The island itself shows alienation because nothing is around it. Caliban, who was previously the owner of the island, is forced to become an outsider because of his enslavement. Caliban is not just isolated physically, but also because of the alien and monstrous feeling he gets because of Prospero and Miranda. The play shows that physical alienation can be solved with a good surrounding, but personal isolation is a whole different monster. It is not just Caliban who becomes enslaved, but many other island inhabitants are alienated because of Prospero (Angel). Ariel also has to deal with some isolation when Caliban’s mother, Sycorax, traps him in a tree (Shakespearean Criticism). Race was also seen as a big theme in the play. Prospero is both European and Christian, which right away makes him the island’s natural ruler, even though people like Caliban and Ariel are already there. Prospero’s taking of the island shows that he believes Caliban is below him because of race and because his mother is a witch. There is a big difference between the culture of Prospero and Miranda and the culture of Caliban: Prospero and Miranda are high on words, either written or spoken, and Caliban is high on his life and the island (Angel). One of the bigger themes seen is The Tempest is love and marriage. In the play, Miranda and Prince Ferdinand fall in love at first sight, which pleases Prospero, who is said to have had the two set up to meet and fall in love. During Shakespeare’s time, most marriages were arranged, but the best ones involved a real love between the two getting married. It was considered a responsibility of the father to provide his son or daughter with a mate of which the child was forced to accept. Even though the marriage between Miranda and Prince Ferdinand is arranged, the two love each other, which thrills Prospero. The marriage is as definitely a political as well as a romantic one: it promises to keep Prospero’s family powerful in Italy’s city states. Prospero finally shows love to his brother at the end of the story as well, forgiving him of his wrongdoing (Overview: The Tempest).

Two major symbols were seen in The Tempest. One of the major symbols seen throughout the whole play is magic. Many magicians in Shakespeare’s day were involved in alchemy. This was a study devoted to converting base metal into gold, finding a cure for all illnesses, and lengthening human life. Around the time that The Tempest was written, alchemy was well-known in England as well as the rest of Europe. In the play, Prospero brings to mind an alchemist- magic with the soul and the body (Overview: The Tempest). Prospero practices both harmful magic and “white,” or positive magic. Caliban’s mother, the witch Sycorax, uses black magic to trap Ariel inside the trunk of a tree which Prospero frees him from (Shakespearean Criticism). Religion is also considered to be a major theme in The Tempest. Ariel carries away the dinner of the villains while dressed as a harpy, and he then tells them that he is a “minister of Fate,” in that “the powers” have told nature to punish them for their sins....

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...The Tempest
The Tempest is a play written by the legendary, William Shakespeare. It is disputed if whether or not it was the last play he wrote in 1611, perhaps fascinating his audience for the last time. The play falls under the romance (tragicomedy) category which designates it to be a tragedy and a comedy cleverly intertwined. Not unlike his other plays, Shakespeare wrote The Tempest in iambic pentameter with the exception of some prose here and there. This mysterious tale is very deserving of its acclamation, from both the modern and Elizabethan ages.
Time Period
Shakespeare wrote and published this play in the early seventeenth century, known by most as the late Renaissance era. The Renaissance is usually distinguished as a time of revolutionary culture starting in Italy and spreading outward to the rest of Europe. During the Renaissance, play-writers began to exaggerate the word “drama,” whereas blending tragedy and comedy became a much simpler task for Shakespeare. The Tempest was one of the tragicomedies within this trend.
The story takes place on an island in the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of Italy, and makes important references to Naples, Milan, Carthage, and Tunis. These references help readers understand the time-in-history of the play. This is best represented when Prospero tells Miranda about how they got to the island:
To have no screen between this part he played
And him he played it...

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The Tempest
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This article is about the Shakespeare play. For other uses, see The Tempest (disambiguation).
The shipwreck in Act I, Scene 1, in a 1797 engraving based on a painting by George Romney
The Tempest is a play by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written in 1610–11, and thought by many critics to be the last play that Shakespeare wrote alone. It is set on a remote island, where Prospero, the rightful Duke of Milan, plots to restore his daughter Miranda to her rightful place using illusion and skillful manipulation. He conjures up a storm, the eponymous tempest, to lure his usurping brother Antonio and the complicit King Alonso of Naples to the island. There, his machinations bring about the revelation of Antonio's lowly nature, the redemption of the King, and the marriage of Miranda to Alonso's son, Ferdinand.
There is no obvious single source for the plot of The Tempest, but researchers have seen parallels in Erasmus's Naufragium, Peter Martyr's De orbe novo, and an eyewitness report by William Strachey of the real-life shipwreck of the Sea Venture on the islands of Bermuda. In addition, one of Gonzalo's speeches is derived fromMontaigne's essay Of the Canibales, and much of Prospero's renunciative speech is taken word for word from a speech by Medea in Ovid's poem Metamorphoses. Themasque in...

...Revenge
A statement that many could agree with is: nothing in this world feels better than successfully plotting revenge against someone who has harmed you. In Shakespeare’s last full play, The Tempest, he takes on the task of tackling several acts of betrayal amidst the characters. It seems to be that every character has experienced some sort of conflict with another character pushing them to want to act upon it. If revenge is the best way to overcome a betrayal, can it be concluded that all the characters in the play are reciprocating the pain at the people that hurt them?
From the beginning there is a strong dispute between Antonio and Prospero who are in a struggle for power over Milan. Prospero, who formally was the duke of Milan, was being robbed of his position from the person that was supposed to care for him the most, his own blood brother. It is evident that Prospero is deeply affected by Antonio’s betrayal as he proclaims:
But what my power might else exact, like one who having unto truth, by telling of it, made such a sinner of his memory to credit his own lie, he did believe he was indeed the Duke, out o’ th’ substitution and executing th’ outward face of royalty with all prerogative. Hence his ambition growing dost thou hear? (10)
As Prospero is sharing this distress with his daughter Miranda, he is making sure she catches every detail of it. He strongly discusses his concern for his loss of power and the well being of the...

...Relevance of The Tempest in the Modern Wo
The Tempest, a pastoral tragicomedy by William Shakespeare, was written in the Renaissance period. When the play was written, the particular context that the author intended and that the audience received would be different to the meanings and ideas that we pick up from studying or viewing the play now. For example, the way that women in particular are portrayed in old plays such as The Tempest is quite derogatory and would be unacceptable for a modern play. Various meanings in The Tempest demonstrate this difference in the distinct readings that you can find in the text today, and those meanings that we can try to simulate by looking at the text from a historical context.
One meaning that could have been picked up from the play, both in the seventeenth century and now, is that there are always lessons to be learnt about your true nature, and always ways to improve your self. This meaning is largely picked up from the central character of Prospero, the ruler of the magical island of The Tempest. Prospero, as the self-appointed mentor of the people who have landed on his island, must teach everybody a lesson about themselves, and try to make them better people. For example, the socially-constructed and arrogant Ferdinand. It is unclear exactly how much the love between him and Prospero's daughter, Miranda, was engineered by Prospero and how much was actually...

...Love Throughout the Storm
In the Tempest, by Shakespeare we see the love of family, love of country, and personal love dominate The Tempest and inform nearly every significant action. Caliban loves the island, Ariel loves natural freedom, Prospero loves his daughter, Alonso his son, and so on. But the traitors Antonio and Sebastian are also defined by love, or really the lack thereof. They are in love with power, or the potential for it. In this play, each player is on a quest for some kind of love or another, fulfilling their own version of what it means to be appreciated and, in the case of the best, to appreciate others.
Love is something that everyone should obtain because without it we will not be able to love one another. In The Tempest by Shakespeare, we tend to come across with love, a good example is when Miranda the daughter of Prospero meets Ferdinand who she falls in love with. Is there love at first sight? We witness how Miranda and Ferdinand fall in love unnaturally being the result of magic. In awe we see how Ferdinand asks Miranda if she is a virgin as one of the prerequisites of their marriage. Ferdinand: “O, if a virgin, and your affection not gone forth, I’ll make you the queen of Naples. [Ferdidnand-1.2.538-540](Shakespeare,A.,andWerstine 538-540). Is it okay for Ferdinand to ask such question? Well yes it is, in the play a woman’s virginity is central to her being able to love is a virtue. Virginity is...

...﻿Missy (Melissa) Hanson
Dr. Brooke Kowalke
Shakespeare Literature
20 February 2015
Response Paper for The Tempest
Throughout William Shakespeare's play, The Tempest, many different themes and motifs are present. However, power and gender roles strongly influence the directionality of the plot. Specifically, the characters Prospero and Sycorax tend to represent two opposing ideas of what it means to be male versus a female and to have power versus not having power. The patriarchy is one that seems to be led and determined largely by Prospero, however, is a coherent system which is opposite of the system Sycorax represents. By analyzing the actions of the male characters in conjunction with the analysis of the way Sycorax character affects the others in the play, the opposition of gender from the patriarchy is evident. Furthermore, even though Sycorax exists only in the perspective from the male characters, she is thus able to threaten the power of men through her absence.
In the play, the only woman who is physically present is Miranda, Prospero's daughter. Several times throughout the play, she is highly perceived for her virginity or sexual innocence, as seen when Prospero makes certain that Ferdinand wait until marriage to take her sexually (4.1.15). In other words, there is an evident lack of women's physical presence in the play which only allows for a little amount of information to be inferred from the audience, which...

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Supernatural and Magical Elements Present in The Tempest
William Shakespeare incorporated the underlying themes and symbols of magic and supernatural elements throughout his popular play The Tempest. There are many arguments that critics have made as to why he chose to include these recurring themes as well as where the ideas originated. When one thinks of magic, you might immediately associate this term with adolescence, juvenile fantasies or the imagination. The Merriam- Webster dictionary defines magic as “the use of means (as charms or spells) believed to have supernatural power over natural forces”. Although Shakespeare’s perception of magic is not too far off from the contemporary definition, he uses it to present a different message. However there is much more substance and reason behind this element than someone may actually envision. During Shakespearean times, we closely connect magic and manipulation. Manipulation is a substantial component of The Tempest and is exemplified strongly through Shakespeare’s magic elements. William Shakespeare’s The Tempest not only encompasses the themes of magic and supernatural forces throughout, but has also influenced a vast number of novelists to create their own interpretation and versions of the play.
It has been said that The Tempest is one of the most magical pieces of Shakespeare’s literary career. Using magic as a theme can be argued to have...

...repent, Prospero seizes the opportunity and sets out to reverse the events that occurred twelve year previously.
"Hell is empty and all the devils are here,"(Act 1, Scene 1) Ferdinand yelled as he leapt from the burning ship during the tempest. The great tempest that Prospero bade Ariel to create was made by magic. The ship burned but it did not split, break, or sink. The ship was brought safely into the harbor and her crew was magically charmed to sleep. The occurrence of a mighty storm is a pivotal plot-mover, as well as a symbol for transformation. In The Tempest, the storm provides for the arrival of the King of Naples, the usurping Duke of Milan, Gonzalo, and the rest of their party, including Stephano and Trinculo. While the latter two do not experience any profound transformation, the rest do, and it is through the facility of the tempest that this transformation occurs. The survivors of the storm swam to shore and were separated into groups about the island. This serves two purposes. "It allows Prospero to operate on the protagonists separately. It also ensures the emotional shock of (supposedly) losing loved ones will make Ferdinand and Alonzo more open to the fresh experiences they will encounter on the island." (Hirst) The Tempest provides the means for Prospero to right what has gone wrong in the past. By bringing his usurping brother and his court to the island Prospero can teach them...